12 MARXISM AND DARWINISM. 



which they ate, their necks were stretched so that a 

 short-necked animal developed to the long-necked gi- 

 raflfe. To many this explanation was incredible and 

 it could not account for the fact that the frog should 

 have such a green color which served him as a good 

 protecting color. 



To solve the same question, Darwin turned to 

 another line of experience. The animal breeder and 

 the gardener are able to raise artificially new races 

 and varieties. When a gardener wants to raise from 

 a certain plant a variety having large blossoms, all he 

 has to do is to kill before maturity all those plants 

 having small blossoms and preserve those having 

 large ones. If he repeats this for a few years in suc- 

 cession, the blossoms will be ever larger, because each 

 new generation resembles its predecessor, and our 

 gardener, having always picked out the largest of the 

 large for the purpose of propagation, succeeds in rais- 

 ing a plant with very large blossoms. Through such 

 action, done sometimes deliberately and sometimes 

 accidentally, people have raised a great number of 

 races of our domesticated animals which dilifer from 

 their original form much more than the wild kinas 

 differ from each other. 



If we should ask an animal-breeder to raise a long- 

 necked animal from a short-necked one, it would not 

 appear to him an impossibility. All he would have to 

 do would be to choose those having partly longer 

 necks, have them inter-bred, kill the young ones hav- 

 ing narrow necks and again have the long-necked 

 inter-breed. If he repeated this at every new genera- 

 tion the result would be that the neck would ever be- 

 come longer and we would get an animal resembling 

 the giraffe. 



